Synergy between Sustainability and Desirability

Transcription

1 Synergy between Sustainability and Desirability In today's environmentally conscious market, there are increasing instances of so called sustainable products" which often fail to convince the public as a desirable product. Until recently, the concept of sustainability has hardly gone beyond the environment-saving aspect of it and reached design topics such as "Sustainable Aesthetics". This research investigates the ways to make sustainable products more desirable. Automobile as one of the most influential inventions of 20 th century is in the brink of a major transformation due to sustainability concerns of the current paradigm of mobility. Thus it has been chosen as the subject of this study. In this study a case research on city cars as an eco-friendly and thus sustainable type of motor vehicle has been selected. Two series of studies for investigating public perception of sustainability and form aesthetics has been conducted on a number of existing (and later designed) vehicles in this class. Study objective The main objective of the research is to answer this question: 1. What makes a product (in our case, city cars) more desirable in public opinion(?). "Desirability" is one of many emotions that could be elicited while experiencing a product. How about other emotions, that shapes our product experience? The second objective was: 2. Investigate the role of emotions is the way people perceive products. The concept of "sustainability" has a complex and multi-faceted nature which could not so easily be expressed in product form-giving. Therefore the third objective of the study was: 3. Find a meaningful way of communicating a tangible manifest of sustainability; and devise a method to investigate people's perception of "sustainable aesthetics".

2 Study design The study was framed with two non-verbal experiments one of which was PrEmo as the emotion study (figure 1). Figure 1: PrEmo user interface In the other experiment 1, which was designed to investigate sustainable aesthetics, symbolic and semantic functions of a number of selected pictures were used as a communicative medium in conveying the relevant manifest of sustainability (figure 2). Figure 2: SADS interface 1 Sustainable Aesthetics in Design Study (acronym: SADS)

3 For these studies 9 city cars were selected as stimuli considering the form language diversity. Each stimulus had 2 images of front and rear quarter view of each city car. In order to calibrate results of the study the stimuli were manipulated in Photoshop to eliminate distractions caused by photo ambience and generate a holistic impression of the form of the cars ignoring unnecessary details. Below in figure 3 an example stimulus can be found. Figure 3: Example of a stimulus Fourty Iranian people participated in each study including both gender between 20 to 35 years old.

4 Results The raw data gathered for PrEmo experiment was analyzed with Correspondence Analysis for which the results are displayed in figure 4. Figure 4: PrEmo experiment results Two stimuli of PininFarina B0 and Ciroen C-airplay respectively scored highest in evoking positive emotions and as the graphical representation of the analysis reveals they both situated in close proximity of desirability, pride, satisfaction, hope, and joy.

5 For the SADS experiment Factor analysis was utilized to interpret the raw data. The results revealed that Pinin Farina B0, VW Up! And Citroen C-airplay was located in close proximity of "aesthetically more sustainable" entities. The graphical representation of the SADS analysis is displayed in Figure 5 Figure 5: SADS experiment results

6 Putting the results of two experiments together, two vehicles Pinin Farina B0 and Citroen C-airplay were selected for a comprehensive ontological study of shape aesthetics (volume arrangement, surface treatment, and aesthetic key lines) for reflection in the design phase. Ultimately the reflection of the findings manifested in three concepts which are displayed in Figure 6 Figure 6: three design Concepts

7 In the last stage of study, another session of PrEmo experiment was conducted with same 40 participants for the three developed concept. The result of this session is displayed in Figure 7. Figure 7: results of PrEmo Experiment for designed concepts

8 PrEmo appraisal As a self reporting non verbal method, PrEmo provide an opportunity to study the emotions evoked in product experience without being bond to limitation imposed by language usage. Moreover PrEmo is a disciplined method, which has claimed categorizing human emotions in to a set of more or less universally accepted standard. This study, conducted in a substantially different cultural and social context, could be a testimony for universality of PrEmo. However, in the course of the experiment it became apparent that majority of participants found some of the emotions obsolete and/or irrelevant such as: fascination and Sadness. As mentioned earlier, in the latter part of the study PrEmo was also used for the evaluation of the designed concepts. In this part a round table animation of each concept was often used for better communication. However, displaying the stimuli with three quarter still rendering images versus a roundtable animation revealed a major difference in results. Therefore adding a roundtable animation to PrEmo would be a significant improvement especially for design evaluation. Personal and Background information Affiliations Name: Institution: Program: Bahareh Barati Department of Industrial Design, School of Fine Arts, University of Tehran Master of Fine Arts Industrial Design As a graduating master student I used PrEmo in my thesis project titled: Sustainable Aesthetics in Automotive Form giving. Publication(s) Under development

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